Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

SEARCH KEYWORD -- custom exception

  Program Or Be Programmed

On Thursday night I gave a talk at NYU Poly and in the Q&A a young man asked me for advice for "those who aren't technical". I said he should try to get technical. The next morning I met with a bunch of Sloan Business School students doing a trek through NYC. A young woman asked me the same question. I gave her the same answer.I don't mean that everyone should become a software engineer. I do mean that everyone should understand software engineering (or whatever technical...

   Program,Technical,Basic knowledge     2011-11-10 10:31:02

  Introducing JavaScript native file management

TL;DR The Mozilla Platform keeps improving: JavaScript native file management is an undergoing work to provide a high-performance JavaScript-friendly API to manipulate the file system. The Mozilla Platform, JavaScript and Files The Mozilla Platform is the application development framework behind Firefox, Thunderbird, Instantbird, Camino, Songbird and a number of other applications. While the performance-critical components of the Mozilla Platform are developed in C/C++, an increasing number o...

   JavaScript,File,Local file,Firfox,Mozilla     2011-12-06 09:05:48

  Python threads: communication and stopping

A very common doubt developers new to Python have is how to use its threads correctly. Specifically, a large amount of questions on StackOverflow show that people struggle most with two aspects: How to stop / kill a threadHow to safely pass data to a thread and back I already have a blog post touching on these issues right here, but I feel it’s too task-specific for sockets, and a more basic and general post would be appropriate. I assume the reader has a basic familiarity with Pytho...

   Python,Multithreading,Communication,Synchronize     2011-12-28 07:38:32

  How to read Haskell like Python

Have you ever been in the situation where you need to quickly understand what a piece of code in some unfamiliar language does? If the language looks a lot like what you’re comfortable with, you can usually guess what large amounts of the code does; even if you may not be completely familiar how all the language features work.For Haskell, this is a little more difficult, since Haskell syntax looks very different from traditional languages. But there's no really deep difference here; you j...

   Haskell,Python,Format,Like,Similarity     2011-11-15 08:45:39

  Valid JavaScript variable names

Did you know var π = Math.PI; is syntactically valid JavaScript? I thought this was pretty cool, so I decided to look into which Unicode glyphs are allowed in JavaScript variable names, or identifiers as the ECMAScript specification calls them. Reserved words The ECMAScript 5.1 spec says: An Identifier is an IdentifierName that is not a ReservedWord. The spec describes four groups of reserved words: keywords, future reserved words, null literals and boolean lite...

   JavaScript,Name convention,Standard     2012-02-22 05:16:53

  CSS3 & HTML5 Support in Browsers

Last week we launched FindMeByIP.com, a simple app which reveals your browsers' support for CSS3 and HTML5 features in an easy to read format using Modernizr.We've had a great response and we're going to be implementing some of your feedbackin the near future.UPDATE: Check out our Web Designers' HTML5 & CSS3 ChecklistFor now though I thought people mind find it useful to know the state of support in the current browser market.  I've taken all the A-Gra...

   CSS,HTML5,Web browser,Support     2011-05-14 11:26:45

  Speed Hashing

A given hash uniquely represents a file, or any arbitrary collection of data. At least in theory. This is a 128-bit MD5 hash you're looking at above, so it can represent at most 2128 unique items, or 340 trillion trillion trillion. In reality the usable space is substantially less; you can start seeing significant collisions once you've filled half the space, but half of an impossibly large number is still impossibly large. Back in 2005, I wondered about the difference between a checksum and...

   Speed hashing,Security,MD5     2012-04-07 10:35:15

  The Five Stages of Hosting

As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of 'cloudiness'. People who aren't interested in this kind of minutia would be wise to pull the rip cord right here. 1. The Monastery You run your site on an 'application platform' like Heroku, Azure, or Google App Engine. You design your application around whatever metaphors and APIs the service lays out, and in return you are veiled from all t...

   Website hosting,Recommendations,Stages,Advantages     2012-01-30 05:43:42

  Have you used these JavaScript libraries before?

Are you a vanilla JavaScript developer or a JavaScript library lover?  If you are a vanilla JavaScript developer, please feel free to step away silently because you may not get what you want, but if you are a library or framework lover, please bookmark this page as what we list below are what you may use in the future. There are tons of JavaScript libraries created to ease the headache of developers who have to deal with different browsers on different devices. You may use some of them befo...

   JavaScript,Framework,Library     2014-09-27 22:06:55

  Code coverage rate

When doing unit testing, the code coverage rate is often used as the criteria for measuring testing performance, even in some cases code coverage may be used to consider whether the testing task is completed or not. So testers need to spend much time on designing test cases which can cover as many codes as possible. There are advantages and disadvantages about using code coverage rate. First let's check what is code coverage rate: code coverage rate= the degree of code coverage in testing. There...

   Unit testing,Code coverage     2013-04-16 12:50:57

RECENT